The Amazonia: Discovery, Colonisation, and Ecological Degradation
A World Hidden Inside the Woods Mayan and Inca civilizations of the South and North Americas always evoke a mysterious charm, which also keeps hidden beneath it, the colonization and genocide that the native people of the Amazonia had to undergo through centuries. Both these civilizations emerged in their full glory around the 1400s and 1500s, but the sun set over them too soon, when the Europeans arrived on the shores of the Americas. According to ‘The Handbook of South American Indians’, written in the late 1940s by J.H. Steward, the South American indigenous people can be broadly categorized into four groups- the nomadic hunter-gatherers, small farmers who lived in the farming villages inside the Amazon forest, irrigated cultivators of the Central Andes region, and the local chiefdoms of the Caribbean area. Steward was an anthropologist who concentrated his studies on the subsistence of people. He introduced to the world, the concept of cultural ecology. Indigenous tribe...
